Showing results by narrator "Tony Robinson" in All Categories

Football has come to the ancient city of Ankh-Morpork - not the old fashioned, grubby pushing and shoving, but the new, fast football with pointy hats for goalposts and balls that go gloing when you drop them. And now, the wizards of Unseen University must win a football match, without using magic, so they're in the mood for trying everything else.

There's nothing like the issue of evolution to get under the skin of academics. Especially when those same academics are by chance or bad judgement deposited at a critical evolutionary turning point when one wrong move could have catastrophic results for the future. Unfortunately, in the hands of such an inept and cussed group of individuals, the sensitive issue of causality is, sadly, only likely to receive the same scant respect that they show to one another.

An aura of mean-minded resentfulness is thick in the streets of Ankh-Morpork. Insurrection is in the air. The Haves and Have-Nots are about to fall out all over again. The Have-Nots want some of their own magic. But magic in the hands of amateurs is a dangerous thing. The City Watch is the last line of defence against such unnatural goings-on. But when even the Watch have trouble telling right from wrong, you know that law and order ain't what they used to be. But that's all about to change.

Never let real life get in the way of a good story, especially when a good story involves three witches, including a fairy godmother, and travelling to a faraway land to make sure that a servant girl doesn't marry a prince. It looks as though a happy ending may be averted before catastrophe strikes. But unfortunately, the forces of good are up against a godmother who has made Destiny an offer it can't refuse.

Another fascinating title in the fantastically funny history series from the acclaimed Tony Robinson. Tony Robinson takes you on a headlong gallop through time, pointing out all the most important, funny, strange, amazing, entertaining, smelly and disgusting bits about the British! It's history, but not as we know it! Find out everything you ever needed to know in this brilliant, action-packed, fact-filled book.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a policeman taking a holiday would barely have had time to open his suitcase before he finds his first corpse. And Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is on holiday in the pleasant and innocent countryside, but not for him a mere body in the wardrobe. There are many, many bodies and an ancient crime more terrible than murder. He is out of his jurisdiction, out of his depth, out of bacon sandwiches, and occasionally snookered and out of his mind, but never out of guile. Where there is a crime there must be a finding, and a chase....

All is not well within the Unseen University. The endemic politics of the place have ensured that it has finally got what it wished for: the most powerful wizard on the disc - which could mean that the death of all wizardry is at hand. And that the world is going to end, depending on whom you listen to. Unless, of course, one inept wizard can take the University's most precious artefact, the very embodiment of magic itself, and deliver it halfway across the disc to safety.

Johnny Maxwell and his friends have to do something when they find Mrs Tachyon, the local bag lady, semi-conscious in an alley...as long as it's not the kiss of life. But there's more to Mrs Tachyon than a squeaky trolley and a bunch of dubious black bags. Somehow she holds the key to different times, different ears: including the Blackbury Blitz in 1941. Suddenly, now isn't the safe place Johnny once thought it was as he finds himself caught up more and more with then.

To the consternation of the patrician, Lord Vetinari, a new invention has arrived in Ankh-Morpork - a great clanging monster of a machine that harnesses the power of all of the elements: earth, air, fire and water. This being Ankh-Morpork, it's soon drawing astonished crowds, some of whom caught the zeitgeist early and arrive armed with notepads and very sensible rainwear.

Somewhere in a place so far up there is no down, a ship is waiting to take the nomes home: back to wherever they came from. And one nome, Masklin, knows that they've got to try and contact this ship. It means getting to Florida (wherever that is), then getting to the launch of a communications satellite (whatever that is). A ridiculous plan. Impossible. But Masklin doesn't know this, so he tries to do it anyway.

Other children receive xylophones. Susan just had to ask her grandfather to take his vest off. Yes. There's a Death in the family. It's hard to grow up normally when Grandfather rides a white horse and wields a scythe: especially when you have to take over the family business, and everyone mistakes you for the Tooth Fairy. And especially when you have to face the new and addictive music that has entered Discworld. It's lawless. It changes people. It's called Music With Rocks In.

Tony Robinson stars in this BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of E. T. A. Hoffmann's renowned Christmas story, which inspired Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker. It is Christmas Eve, and young Mary and Fred are opening presents from their godfather, Drosselmeier the toymaker. Mary's favourite gift is a nutcracker soldier, and she is disappointed when his jaw breaks on a particularly hard nut.

Shortlisted for the British Book Awards, Children's Book of the Year, 2007.
Tiffany Aching is a trainee witch now working for the seriously scary Miss Treason. But when Tiffany witnesses the Dark Dance, the crossover from summer to winter, she does what no one has ever done before: she leaps into the dance. And into the oldest story there is.

The most powerful men in the world were all together in a circle in the middle of the room. Drawing their daggers, they cut their right hands and, above the pile of gold, swore Odysseus’ vow: Helen could marry whom she liked, and the Princes would defend them both.… Everyone’s heard of the wooden horse of Troy, and of the beauty of Helen. Well this is the story as Odysseus saw it, from his boyhood in Ithaca to his participation in the bloody Trojan war itself.

A real witch never casually steps out of her body, leaving it empty. Eleven-year-old Tiffany Aching does. And there's something just waiting for a handy body to take over. Something ancient and horrible and that can't die. Tiffany returns in this exciting new adventure, helped as before by the Nac Mac Feegle - the rowdiest, toughest, smelliest bunch of fairies ever to be thrown out of Fairyland for being drunk at two in the afternoon. They'll fight anything!

Koom Valley? That was where the trolls ambushed the dwarfs, or the dwarfs ambushed the trolls. It was far away. It was a long time ago. But if he doesn't solve the murder of just one dwarf, Commander Sam Vimes of Ankh-Morpork City Watch is going to see it fought again, right outside his office. With his beloved Watch crumbling around him and war-drums sounding, he must unravel every clue, outwit every assassin, and brave any darkness to find the solution. And darkness is following him.

When a large, heavily fortified and armoured empire makes a faintly menacing request of a much smaller, infinitely more cowardly neighbour, it would be churlish, if not extremely dangerous, not to comply; particularly if all they want is a wizard, and they don't specify whether competence is an issue.

Norman is an idealistic, Beethoven-loving revolutionary. Max is a boring but cheerful timeshare salesman who won't stop talking. Fellow passengers on a flight to the Moon, they're thrown together to become reluctant companions after the lunar shuttle's toilet cubicle explodes, crash-landing them both on the desert sands of a distant alien planet. They are rescued by the friendly Oblivions, who could not be more delighted to see them.

It has taken ten long, bloody years for the Greeks to win the Trojan War and now Odysseus, their victorious leader, wants nothing more than to return home to his wife and son. But the only person who can tell him the way home is the prophet Tyresius, and he has been dead for hundreds of years….

Mightily Oats has not picked a good time to be priest. He thought he'd come to the mountain kingdom of Lancre for a simple little religious ceremony. Now he's caught up in a war between vampires and witches, and he's not sure there is a right side.